GRP Chapter 8

A few hours earlier, Mariaeks had listened to some humans picking their careful way along the far bank of the river.

'You know those thieves that have been causing such a fuss lately? I heard they got caught.'

'First I've heard of it.'

‘My little brother works at the fortress—told me in secret, he did—says the thieves are northern spirits. They've got them locked up in the castle's cellar right now.'

'What kind of northern spirit goes around stealing from a campfire?'

'No, really, it's true! Two spirits in the shape of white wolves, he said, size of this." A gesture, lost to distance. "That's exactly why we're out here taking our lives in our hands on patrol. Wondering if something happened in Heimdrykze.'

Mariaeks had not realized she'd drifted across the river in a daze. Her mind came back to her only now, confronted with this nest of insects. It was here, only now, that she grasped she was on the verge of defying sacred law.

She stood at the gate, teetering like a dead tree. Neither advancing nor retreating, she simply waited—hoping the great god might see fit to send a revelation telling her the correct thing to do. The right answer was always at the end of divine will. Why did every choice she made feel so hasty, so foolish? Even if she'd had some slightly more useful power than the one she possessed—would that have made things better?

The only power Mariaeks had was to bring forth bloom from her own palms.

Rhaevydie had looked at the flowers blooming from Mariaeks’s hands and burst into that bright, sharp giggle of hers. What is the point of that, Mariaeks?

Rhaevydie was not wrong. Heimdrykze was a place where the law of the strong held absolutely. The weak died; the strong survived. The only creature who had slipped past that clean logic was Mariaeks herself—kept alive purely through the great Absolute's provision, despite possessing an ability useful to no one.

Getting that far in her thinking, Mariaeks understood. She had been operating under a very grand delusion. She who could barely manage to breathe without divine protection—what made her think she had the power to save anyone? It was never a question of whether she willed it. It was a question of whether she could.

'My sweet Mariaeks…'

At that moment, wind grazed past her ear. On that cold current Mariaeks found herself thinking of the small and weathered shrine. That was where she belonged. The peaceful day that began the same way and ended the same way, repeating itself endlessly—that was her entire world.

Mariaeks decided to follow the god's will and return.

Sadly, there was one thing she had forgotten. Life does not run on intention alone.

"Could you not block the way, you—"

A sudden surge of people from behind knocked her this way and that. One step. Two. Five. Eight.

That was how Mariaeks crossed into the fortress wall.

She stood rigid, turning only her head to look back at the snow-covered mountain range beyond the gate.

She had expected something to happen the instant she crossed. The mountains splitting apart with a great shudder, red light blazing through the fissure. The sky turning black. Or the great god descending personally into this land of insects, turning the humans to ice with his own hands. Some circumstance more terrible than anything she could imagine—she'd been sure of it.

Nothing happened.

Only then could she truly feel it, in the marrow: the great god was asleep. He had been asleep now for roughly a hundred years, and perhaps—perhaps—he would not know about this.

Mariaeks turned her head again and looked at the streets where humans moved about. And further still, past the other buildings, to the rough-hewn fortress that rose higher than everything else.

'They've got them locked up in the castle's cellar right now.'

Her pink eyes lit.

"How are you feeling?"

At Samthyeon's question, Garthe drew a slow hand along his jaw and smiled.

"See for yourself."

"Guess you're feeling like shit, then."

Garthe nodded without hesitation.

"The herb blend I prepared this time—how is it working?"

"Losing its edge."

"Tolerance. Shall we try a different compound."

He thought for a moment, then came to the point.

"Any progress on the journey?"

'Progress.'

What Samthyeon meant by progress was any lead whatsoever connected to the curse. It had been roughly a year's expedition. Laughably short a time to uncover information that had resisted a lifetime of searching. Garthe answered with a cold smile.

"None, I take it."

"And you?"

Samthyeon reached into his robe and took hold of the medallion hanging there, gave it a single shake. Among the countless priests of the Thul'Mhoriae Alliance, only ten Grand Priests carried that symbol. The gesture translated roughly as: Do you know who you're talking to.

In the beginning there existed only a formless force—called the Void, or Providence. In resistance to it, two gods were born. The one called the Father, god of destruction, sealed the Void within his own heart and ended his own life. The Father's shattered remains gradually accumulated and consolidated into a single mass. That mass became the continent as it exists today.

The Father's sacrifice was not enough to dispel the Void entirely. For a time, nothing lived anywhere in the world. The Mother grieved, and became a single white tree, and took root in the Father's remains. In response to the Mother's power of creation, living things were born across the continent—those with two legs, those with four, those whose roots drove deep into the earth, those who swam in water and drifted on wind. What scholars today call the Ancient Divine Age had begun.

The ancient gods, born from the Father's remains with the Void still sealed within, inherited the vast abilities of both the Father and the Mother. Because they had been intertwined with Providence from the moment of their birth, none of them could escape death.

And so the ancient gods searched for a way to pass their power forward. They answered the problem the way the Mother had. Each split off a portion of themselves and bestowed it on the generation below, again and again, until what had begun as a mountain was ground to sand. From that grinding arose the current gods, humans, animals, plants, and all the countless peoples of the world.

The Thul'Mhoriae Alliance's priests who called the current gods "fractional gods"—one-half, one-quarter, even one three-thousand-six-hundred-seventy-second—were not, strictly speaking, wrong.

The staggering fact that gods, humans, and all other living things shared a common root had gone unrecognized for a very long time, buried in different forms within them all. The ancient gods had been born not only with their parent gods' abilities but with their fragmented memories as well, and they had carved those memories into their own private language across land and stone and ancient deep-sea floors. This was the origin of what humans today called sacred ruins and holy relics.

One priest had spent the better part of her life following those sacred traces. In time, she succeeded in deciphering the ancient tongue inscribed in one of the greatest ruins—the forest that held the sacred tree. At a time when the dominant belief across the continent was gods are omnipotent and complete; humans are imperfect and insignificant, fit only to pray for salvation—the origin of gods and humans was revealed.

Gods are the boulders and we are the grains of sand. But we are all the same rock. Let us get along, the same rock together.

What was overturned was not simply convention or received wisdom. It was the ground itself, and the sky above it. A single pandemonium broke out over a fact too enormous to believe. What had first been mocked as certain madness eventually became the thing that drew people together. A trickle became a river. Humans began to stand on their own, to separate themselves from the great beings that had harmed them, ruled them, bent them to submission. That was the beginning of the Thul'Mhoriae Alliance.

Following in the tradition of the priest who laid that foundation, the Thul'Mhoriae priesthood had developed into something closer to scholars who traced the past than to worshippers who offered devotion blindly. Samthyeon was one of the heads of that obsessively driven research collective—which was to say, the human who had come closest to understanding the nature of a curse that almost certainly touched divine power. It also meant he held the rank to compel cooperation from temples scattered across the continent, whether they wished to cooperate or not.

Garthe watched Samthyeon's hands moving inside his robe. He drew out something wrapped in tanned leather. A white dagger, delicately worked.

"A holy relic recovered recently from ruins in the northeast."

Other temples apparently called Samthyeon shameless or something worse, for taking every relic the moment it surfaced.

"Fire and destruction are etched deeply into it. Three people went to the god's embrace during the excavation, they tell me—from a prick at the fingertip. I modified it somewhat in my own way. Made it a touch stronger."

Garthe held out his hand. Samthyeon could not bring himself to give it over. His face was heavy with something older than exhaustion—the raw weight of decades of accumulated feeling, not bothering to hide itself. But Garthe had no patience left to receive it. He smiled, and the look he gave was cold.

"Samthyeon."

At the short warning, Samthyeon let out a long breath. He placed the dagger in Garthe's outstretched palm. Garthe reversed his grip on it and raised it toward his own heart.

Samthyeon watched with sunken eyes.

The dagger's sharp tip tore through cloth. Through skin. Through muscle. And lodged in the heart. Red spread across the white fabric. Garthe's brow creased and one corner of his mouth lifted.

Time passed.

The white tunic was entirely soaked. Enough blood for an ordinary human to have made the journey to the god's embrace long since.

Samthyeon, who had been silent, finally broke.

"How does it feel. Does it seem like you might die. Any dizziness, any blurring of consciousness?"